The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

Haven't you guys ever heard the story of the dog and the dancing duck?

Some (ok, a lot) quickies from the last few weeks...
* Gretchen stopped by in her periodic visits to Looieville. We couldn't meet for dinner, so I had lunch with her in the airport before she flew home.
* Darrell complained that I hadn't written anything in my blog for a while. Now I have. So shut up.
* As indicated by my previous entry, the blog has finally moved to WOPR. Yay! It's a significantly faster machine. Here's what I wrote closing the "install MT Blog on WOPR" ticket:
bq. Finally done. Couldn't take my slow-ass old 100MHz P1 with 32MB anymore (and it keeps getting hit by search engines, making its speed similar to that of a constipated sloth struggling to re-surface after falling in a Ukranian frozen vat of 7-11 super-slushes).
bq. What, you ask, was a constipated sloth doing in a Ukranian 7-11? God only knows (because the sloth is dead).
* As a side effect, I'm finally making progress on my WOPR tickets. Yay for me.
* We finally won a football game yesterday against Navy. Woo hoo for not breaking the longest winning streak against a single team in college football! Both teams actually played well, but we looked pretty good. Yay for us. And yay for meaningless stats that are only collected on odd-numbered years by personnel with more than three vowles in their first name on nights with lunar eclipses.
* Speaking of lunar eclipses, last night's eclipse was cool.
* I could have gone to see _Revolutions_ last night, but no, we went to see _Love Actually_ instead. A loosely connected film of about 17 different stories (making the mean actiing time for each actor about 7.3 minutes -- a fairly profitable deal all around) that was somewhat enjoyable. 6.2 minutes.
* I went to the LACSI Symposium and sat on a panel for High Availability and High Performance and presented Sriram's paper on the checkpoint/restart framework in LAM/MPI. It was a damn good talk, if I do say so myself. The conference was actually surprisingly productive -- I got a lot done and met some interesting people that we may actually have productive collaborations with in the future.
* I submitted a paper to IPDS recently (at literally the last minute) about the collective SSI framework in LAM/MPI. It's basically a chapter in my dissertation. Woo hoo! (let's hope the paper gets accepted...)
* Amey has been doing some great work in collective algorithms in LAM/MPI -- comparing what has already been done and implementing new stuff. It's going to rock.
* Nihar is working on a tree-based booting algorithm for LAM/MPI. It's gonna significantly cut down on lamboot time for large clusters. It's also going to rock.
* Shashwat fixed a long-standing lamd UDP packet flood bug (turns out it wasn't too hard, but Brian and I just hadn't had the time to look into it). That also rocks.
* Other smaller projects are also ongoing in LAM/MPI, but they all rock.
* I read Dave Barry's book _Tricky Business_ while on a trip recently. Ehhh. I give it 0 minutes. I like his columns better.
* I finally submitted my final travel voucher from when I was deployed in Arizona last year. I never procrastinate today what I can put off until tomorrow.
* We got a total of about 10 trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Very disappointing. I was in my army uniform (BDUs, web gear, kevlar, etc.). "WHAT?!? YOU WANT SOME CANDY OR SUMPIN'?!?" The parents throught it was hilarious. The kids... hmm... maybe that's why we had so few visitors... Tracy took all the extra candy to work and her cow-orkers "hoovered" it in less than a day (5 bags worth).